As it was more than 2 weeks ago now that I spent three nights as much mesmerized by the features about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander as by the movie itself, I had better write now before I lose contact with what made the movie the meaningful experience it is, and (as I am told) reflects the poetic center of Patrick O’Brian’s historical adventure fiction. It’s this: it combines utterly incompatible feelings (Robert Graves wrote about this regarding verse): on the one hand, the worship necessarily blind to reality of violence on behalf of securing power (and with it wealth, privilege, status, the ceremonies of admiration), and on the other, the realization this demands death, maiming, torture (whipping, flogging, whatever it takes to enforce discipline to be cruel) when what makes life worth living is friendship, imaginative arts, knowledge and immersion in the natural world. Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe in the film) enacts the thrust of the first, and Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) the activities and point of view of the second, with all the characters arranging themselves variously on a continuum between them.

This kind of intense quiet music-making punctuates the sequences

I seem to remember best a wholly naturalistic (it was filmed not computer generated) of Russell Crowe as the captain going for a swim, and everyone aboard watching him with bated breathe lest they lose him.

Russell Crowe as hero

Also the horror of the ship hospital, the operating table as the maimed men were amputated, sewn, and on beds left to die. Richard McCabe as Mr Higgon’s surgeon’s mate’s anguished terror at making a mistake as he imitates Maturin as surgeon whose arm is too hurt to perform himself.

The boy has lost his arm, we watch him follow Maturin around the Galapagos; he is groomed to be a captain himself

I have listened to a marvelous reading aloud on books-on-CD of the third book of the series, H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick Tull where the character of Stephen Maturin emerges fully for the first time as sceptic, objector, doubter, sensitive soul, the alternative voice, and have now placed the first book high on a TBR pile of historical fiction.

Paul Bettany as questioner

I’ve also looked up on my Eighteenth Century World at Yahoo list to see if there was any commentary on the film in 2003 when I saw it with Yvette. I had gone to a session in a ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) panel on film where:

A young Spanish professor, Diego Tellez Alarcia, gave a remarkably well-organized, lucid, and detailed exposition on Master and Commander, an adaptation of several novels by Patrick O’Brian. Mr Alarcia went over the type of film M&C represents, the real historical & contemporary events (one involving the USS Essex) it alludes to, its relationship to O’Brian’s novels, and how it functioned to whip up patriotic emotion after 9/11. Mr Alarcia first used Krakauer, an important film critic (who I’ve read) to argue that films provide a new way of studying history: we can study our culture as an engine of history itself as well as a mirror of society. Films are a new way of writing history as valid as speech and the written word. Mr Alarcia went on about how much effort was put into making the details of the film historically accurate (ship, food, clothes &c). The genre this film belongs to also is the swash-buckler, the rebellious adventure film, the tongue-in-cheek (Captains Courageous, Mutiny on the Bounty, Billy Budd, Pirates of the Carribean). I learned something new about O’Brian’s career: I had thought the Jack Aubrey novels are a roman fleuve, but did not know that O’Brian also translated 30 books from French.

I’ve appended as the comments I received on that listserve some 12 years ago on the film, beginning with a person who loved the books to someone who differed on the film but was glad of the attention repaid to journalism at the time.

We can connect this to Austen in various ways because of her sailor-brothers: here I choose to compare her with her brother’s Francis’s viewpoint on a renegade hero of the time, and Byron’s ironic understanding.

One chapter in Southam’s JA and the Navy is about a little known satire by Austen which shows her to have been a narrowly partisan amoral imperalist Tory type. Southam prints a little known and until now Austen’s little understood satire in the manner of Pope, Swift and others:

Of A Ministry Pitiful, Angry, Mean Of a Ministry pitiful, angry, mean, A gallant commander the victim is seen. For promptitude, vigour, success, does he stand Condemn’d to receive a severe reprimand! To his foes I could wish a resemblance in fate: That they, too, may suffer themselves, soon or late, The injustice they warrent. But vain is my spite They cannot so suffer who never do right.

In brief, Popham was court-martialed for disobeying an order to protect ports in the Cape of Good Hope. Instead he took his ships and attacked some ports in Argentina in order to steal their cargo and help friends upset the Argentinian gov’t and eventually take over. Among other helpmates were the revolutionaries: politics makes temporary bedfellows this way. There’s a long chapter in Southam’s JA and the Navy which shows that in this case Austen was fiercely on the side of an amoral thug-pirate type, Popham.

Why? because he was supported by her brothers; for among other things, his relationship with Moira and others to whom Henry had (very unwisely, but trying hard to make money from money) lent big sums of money. It’s a good instance of her narrow Toryism. The man was out for himself to make huge amounts of money; left his post to go over to another country and simply grab it. One of the sorts of people that make the world miserable for the average person. Even Nelson thought him a horror: Nelson, we have to give this to him, did not seek wealth personally except as it came as part of actions he thought genuinely for the good of the people and land of England.

People like to ignore or not talk about how Wentworth is presented as making money from his ships; we are not told what this actually means in reality. He, though, is not the charlatan type Popham was.

Now Southam keeps saying that the brothers (Francis and Charles and in this case Edward and Henry) would have approved of Popham, but while Henry clearly has behaviors that resemble Popham’s (and Edward is fiercely partisan on behalf of his property, will not help other landowners), not Francis and the two passages that Southam quotes are filled with comments that were they turned to look at Popham would judge him “horrible” and very wrong. In the chapter he registers the idea that it’s just “horrible” for people to bomb others. Popham was an early inventor of the equivalent of today’s drones (drop it on the ship and blow it up), but it was real claptrap and when used as often killed those using it. Nonetheless, he tried it and destroyed four ships in the process.

A drawing-illustration made from the movie — the officers studying maps, planning strategy

Given the continual dropping of bombs on people helpless against them and the targeting of civilians since WW2, it’s worth it to quote some of Francis’s words here. He speaks first (at length, a long sentence) of how impossible it is to “direct” the bombs with “any tolerable precision.” When people drop drones, we are often told a single “terrorist” is killed; not so; you cannot direct them that way; the drone drops the bombs on a house and destroys the house and anyone in it plus usually the whole street. Hundreds are killed and maimed and lives destroyed. Francis Austen:

“This horrible mode of warfare seems scarcely justifiable in principle (amongst civilized nations) short of self-preservation and perhaps its entire want of success may have been a fortunate circumstance for England who could not have expected to be the only power to use such machines and whose shipping would be constantly liable to similar attacks with much greater facility from the exposed situations of the anchorages then used.”

In other words, such bombs could be used against England’s ships. The second is a long passage where he says one must obey the orders of one’s commander. When one is ordered to stay and protect a port, one must. Francis always behaved that way and he missed Trafalgar (which he regretted all his life because it meant less money and less prestige and fewer connections he could pressure) because he obeyed an order. Jane Austen was taking precisely the opposite position. Throughout her letters we see her usual mockery (Southam calls this joking) and adversarial positions to whatever is happening.

Here Southam cavalierly says that Austen liked Popham because her brothers did. One can see parallels with Henry’s banking and loan practices and who he was more than willing to be friendly with but all the evidence suggests Francis would have judged Popham fiercely and said he should be court-martialed.

During this time Jane Austen was reading Charles Pasley’s Essay on Military Policy (you can download this as an ebook and I have) and we find in her letters one of these short phrases, but it is in full admiration. The man advocates the most ruthless of imperalist policies, the sort that leads to what Belgium did in the Congo. I wondered what Austen would have thought of Maturin.

Byron provides a rejoinder to Jane Austen, Pasley, and Popham: Wellington: The Best of Cut-Throats (1819)

Though Britain owes (and pays you too) so much,
Yet Europe doubtless owes you greatly more:
You have repaired Legitimacy’s crutch,
A prop not quite so certain as before:
The Spaniard, and the French, as well as Dutch,
Have seen, and felt, how strongly you restore:
And Waterloo has made the world your debtor
(I wish your bards would sing it rather better).

You are ‘the best of cut-throats’: – do not start;
The phrase is Shakespeare’s, and not misapplied;
War’s a brain-spattering, wind-pipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by right be sanctified.
If you have acted once a generous part,
The world, not the world’s masters, will decide,
And I shall be delighted to learn who,
Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?

I’ve done. Now go and dine from off the plate
Presented by the Prince of the Brazils,
And send the sentinel before your gate
A slice or two from your luxurious meals:
He fought, but has not fed so well of late.
Some hunger, too, they say the people feels: –
There is no doubt that you deserve your ration,
But pray give back a little to the nation.

Never had mortal man had such opportunity
Except Napoleon, or abused it more:
You might have freed fallen Europe from the unity
Of tyrants, and been blest from shore to shore:
And now – what is your fame? Shall the Muse tune it ye?
Now – that the rabble’s first vain shouts are over?
Go! hear it in your famished country’s cries!
Behold the world! and curse your victories!

To return to the 21st century film, Stuart Klawans, the film critic of The Nation provides a perceptive commentary on this film helps explain why it’s alluring experience. His argument is that it has a

deeply erotic charge … which turns out to be powerful and strange.” “It’s there from the first wordless, nocturnal sequence, in which the camera follows a prowling character through the sleeping quarters below deck, where rows of hammocks, seen from below, swing from the ceiling like multiple scrotums. Perhaps the penis is Russell Crowe himself, who makes his first appearance semi-dressed, bursting erect from the captain’s quarters through doors that part like a loosely buttoned fly. Never mind that the Surprise, like all ships, is calls ‘she.’ Weir conceives of it as a huge male body, whichis literally suffused with its crew’s blood. [Klawans was puzzled to read reviews claiming the picture was “stupendously entertaining” and “thrilling”.] You might have thought these writesr were describing The Adventures of Robin Hood rather tnan movie that lingers over the amputation of a young boy’s arm. Sailors are lavishly blown apart; a skull is opened and the brains probed before a fascinated crew; in one extended scene Maturin even performs surgery on himself, digging into his own guts while watching the spectacle in a mirror. Even during the longueurs, when male bodies are not being ripped into, Weir reminds you of the permeability of flesh by providing all the actors with highly visible scars. So it came to me: This penetration of male bodies is what’s thrilling about Master and Commander. How’s that for an S&M title? The infliction and endurance of pain is the sex …

Klawans isn’t “belittling the grandeur, the magnificence, the meticulous recreation” of details of “nautical life, or neglecting “Crowe’s wonderfully assured performance, which is as self-amused as it is amusing.” He agrees with Crowe “that M&C is one enormously expensive art movie.”

I was struck by the emotionalism of Maturin’s intellectual senstive-physician sidekick. I liked how the film questioned and exposed the values behind the male world. Yvette said to that they are the same pair of A Beautiful Mind. Maybe it’s a woman’s emotion picture shot into the center of a swashbuckler by way of Captain Hornblower. It is also siimply a bunch of men enjoying themselves enormously, pretending they are the men at sea, in danger, winning battles, exploring, watching punishment of those who risk all, or betray or undercut the rules. All this under the cover or rational of historical accuracy.

And given my return to historical fiction (Poldark novels, Wolf Hall) and its relationship to historic fiction (older), biography, our understanding of history, now I would like to read a few of the novels

20 Responses

I must confess up front that I love Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring novels, and was very saddened by his death a couple of years ago. Selfishly of course, because I knew no more of his wonderful reads would be forthcoming.

It was with some apprehension that I went to Master and Commander on its opening day (dragging my husband and daughter along), because it is so seldom that a movie can approach the pleasure that a novel can give you. This conveniently enables me to give you their opinions too.

My husband liked it because he likes anything with lots of water, and lots of water is what you will get. He also likes action, which this film has plenty of. My daughter, never having read the books, found the plot very difficult to follow. She found it very long, and considered the movie to consist of one long battle with breaks for storms. It did not hold her interest.

I loved the movie. I didn’t expect it to have all the personal interplay of the novels, but it did give me such pleasure to see such long beloved characters onscreen, even if they didn’t look as I had imagined. Steven Maturin especially was not gargoylic of aspect as he is in the books. The plots of the books (I am dreadfully simplifying here, of course) runs something like this: the book opens with tying up of threads left hanging at the end of the last novel (they remind me of the old fashioned serial movies of Saturday afternoons). If it is the first Patrick O’Brian novel you have read, it can be a bit bewildering. This is why Master and Commander is probably the best book to begin with. Then Jack Aubrey has some kind of money problems, or troubles with the Admiralty, which never wants to give him the ship or the men he wants. He after great travail gets to sea and gets into a battle which doesn’t go well. Lots of problems and troubles. The whole thing ends with a wham
bang of a battle, which Jack inevitably wins.

Of course it is the meat in this sandwich which gives such enjoyment, and I will say that in Master and Commander there wasn’t as much meat as I could have liked. The movie was really a combination of two novels, Master and Commander, and a later one, The Far Side of the World. Some of the statements made by Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) were rather contradictory, such as his stating that he was overstepping his orders by rounding the Horn, and in another spot giving the impression that these were precisely his orders. But this is nitpicking. I would have liked to have seen more of the initial meeting of Aubrey and Maturin, and the circumstances of how Steven came to be on Jack’s boat in the first place.

I didn’t have much problem with the absence of women, who play a larger part in the novels, especially Steven’s wife Diana.

I can only say that Master and Commander is great fun for fans of the novels, and for those easily pleased with lots of noise, like my husband. But I fear that most will not care for it.

My partner and I saw the movie last night and I quite liked it. I have never read any of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, although I have had countless people recommend them to me (the fact that my dissertation involves 18th-century military matters probably accounts for that!). So I had no preconceptions of characters or the like to get past (often a problem, as Jill notes, with film adaptations of books one loves).

It’s certainly an aggressively male movie, with nary a woman to be seen, not even a glimpse; at one point the seaman are quite disgusted as they come up on an island–their first landfall in a long time–and discover through telescopes lots of strange animals and birds, but no women (no people, actually, but it’s the women they want): “No women! That’s unnatural!” So it is…. 😉

The ship is their world, and their fellow sailors and soldiers the only inhabitants of it. I didn’t find the plot hard to follow, and the 2 and a half hours moved quickly for both of us. Like so many modern films, this one makes extensive use of very rapid cuts during action scenes, which I always find disorienting and confusing. Not being male or a big fan of the usual run of action flicks, I liked this a lot more than I expected to. The film-makers are enamoured with quotidian period detail, and clearly worked hard to get these things right. Sometimes actors in period films look so uncomfortable in their clothes, like they can’t get past the feeling that they are wearing costumes rather than clothing, but I thought the cast of this film moved quite naturally in theirs. Let us know what you think of it ..

I also really liked Master and Commander. I confess I have seen it twice. (My fiance has gone three times, claiming it gets better with each viewing!) The movie’s director, Peter Weir, did a wonderful job of capturing the spirit of O’Brian’s novels and a sense of naval life in 1805. I was glad that he didn’t try to pretty it up but portrayed it as it was, weevils and superstitions and all.

I also thought that Russell Crowe made a great Aubrey and Paul Bettany was terrific as Maturin. Their friendship is, for me, the heart of O’Brian’s series, so I was pleased that this film portrayed the complexities of this relationship–the conflicting political beliefs (Maturin is very Whiggish), the different personalities (Aubrey is jovial, loves a bad pun; Maturin is serious, loves dissecting bugs), and the ways in which these men build a strong bond that nothing can break.

Of course, as Leslie points out, the film has a lot of action scenes. I also liked these. I felt confused at times, but I though that this was Weir’s intention because it gave me a sense of how very chaotic battle was.

The soundtrack is also great! If you haven’t seen it, I do recommend
this movie.

I’ve also seen Master and Commander but am possibly in a minority here because I didn’t enjoy it all that much – I could see it was beautifully filmed, but it seemed very long at two-and-a-half hours, and I did notice there weren’t any women. All the same, there were many scenes and moments I did like, and it was very interesting to see such a detailed picture of life aboard a ship at that period. Maybe I would have liked it more if I’d read the Patrick O’Brian books first.

I thought fellow-Brits on the list might be interested to know that the The Times hase a special supplement on Master and Commander, which will contain an eight-page facsimile of an edition of The Times from 1805, including a report on the death of Nelson. I’m excited about this because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a whole newspaper from such a long time back – though I have seen papers from later in the 19th century. It should be fascinating to look at
the advertisements as well as the news items.

[…] connected to, give rise to serial costume drama. I will be writing soon about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander (adapted from an amalgam of several of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, directed and written […]

Master and Commander is one of my favorite movies of all time; I’ve seen it at least three or four times. I came to it not as a particular fan of the novels, though I’ve read a few of them. For me, the grand thrill of it was not the things mentioned here, but the fact that the filmmakers were able to almost magically evoke the sense of what an isolated bubble this small creaking crammed wooden ship was – thousands of miles away from “English civilization,” or any help from anybody whatsoever. The ship becomes civilization in microcosm, with the rigid adherence to strict ancient sometimes senseless discipline the only thing keeping off overtones of Lord of the Flies. The relation to space travel also keeps occurring, maybe because the Galapagos are like walking on the moon. Incidents and attitudes of the 18th century brilliantly conceived by O’Brian find their way into the film, illuminating the past and its mindset. I can’t think of very many “historical” films I’ve admired more. It’s genius, created by an author and filmmakers with real historical imagination. I love the comment that “M&C is one enormously expensive art movie.” Funnily, I never did relate it much to Jane Austen’s world, though O’Brian was a huge Austen lover; I felt that it was his depiction of the world which she did not see, and that he looked on it as such.

I’d never have expected this one to be one of your “favorite movies of all time” since it turns the books into such an all man’s world; despite the presence of Maturin’s point of view on the cruelty and senselessness of killing, war, and the time spent dramatizing in the men the pain, hurt, miseries inflicted on them, the movie endorses the thrill of all this, glamorizes danger, and makes Crowe into your numinous person, justifying the worship of the “special person.” the story of the boy who lost his arm and shows the capacity (as the movie would see this) to be indoctrinated into becoming another Crowe — Nelson lost an arm bothered me. Anyway I was able to accept the movie because of the dialectic between the two viewpoints (though the heroic always won out as Bettany so respected Crowe and Crowe’s feelings for Bettany were more of tolerance as a needed comfort). I wanted to accept it because I revelled in the recreation of this 18th century world at sea and extraordinary uses of filmic techniques of all sorts. I hadn’t thought of it as an analogous fable to Lord of the Flies, but yes I like that too.

The Galapos Island sequence comes from the later book, The Far Side of the World. Izzy who knows the books so well was able to point out to me all the different books brought in.

It could be O’Brian saw his books as depicting all Austen left out, and her presence is in brief imitations and allusions to her novels, some names (I have read the one novel and know pieces from the others from Izzy), but he seems (like Joe Wright in the 2004 P&P) essentially uninterested in what holds Austen’s imagination: he’s going for codes that matter, what controls the scene for he seems to believe these warrior types are shaping the 18th century world when (to use another historical personage) Thomas Cromwell would tell him it’s the banks, the money people running the gov’t and the magistrates and functionaries in the counties that control the society. As you say these people are a band of people off on their own. Cut off — we today almost cannot be with the demand we link into our different connections through the computer. One of the books I’ve read on 20th century historical fiction makes a good case for O’Brian imitating other male historical fiction of the century which uses boys’ adventure stories as the underlying genre. By contrast although Graham uses action-adventure and the tropes and subplot where that is there are chosen for the films more than they dominate the books. The books are more like women’s historical fiction or political historical fiction (coming out of the Victorian period).

If i use as a criteria for what is a favorite movie, have you seen it several times?, several of the Jane Austen films emerge that way (the 1995 Sense and Sensibility is one of several) and a number of the mini-series costume dramas — I just loved Brideshead Revisited, Jewel in the Crown, Andrew Davies’s Little Dorrit). I see Master and Commander also belonging to the genre of costume drama, yes historical films. Wolf Hall is joining these for now. I used to rewatch some of the later 1930s and 40s “classics” (when a girl Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Talk of the Town) but nowadays we are no longer stuck watching what the movie-makers deign to put on TV so these are supeceded. Despite my admiration and how I’m moved for deeply sad movies or hard (like Kurosawa’s, or Vanya on 42nd Street or Polanski or Bergmann films say), my favorite movies are more of the comfort or ironic finally affirmative or at least acceptance type (Gosford Park, Altman films). Instead of making, they help against bad dreams.

I should also have mentioned Austen’s two sailor brothers and their lives. I connect the books to her world through them and her knowledge — however kept out of the books except as part of the male’s background; and censored from her letters, with three packets to Francis destroyed. That their sea worlds are still there is I suppose remarkable. Maybe she would have liked to go to sea when she was younger; she loved to sit by the sea, walk by it, look at it. In this regard Emma never having seen the sea is a kind of metaphor for her own locked-in life.

It did take me 11 years after first viewing to write about this one, and what fueled the writing were the features about the filming, the painstaking expensive literal recreations and accuracy, the talk about the meaning of the film. I did not expect anyone to bring out the reactionary politics, but they are there and shoring up our world today so the Jane Austen and Byron debate makes the film’s more important political relevance available to a reader.

I know what you mean, Ellen, being surprised that such a man’s world film wold be one of my very favorites of all time – and yet, it is! I’ve seen it several times, and even if it happens to be on TV and I catch just a segment of it, I am always gripped, drawn in, mesmerized. Very few films have this effect on me. It doesn’t repel me because there’s so much male violence and harshness; rather I’m exhilarated because the lying falsity of most films is almost absent here, as the filmmakers honestly try to show and understand some of the ways people really thought and acted in the 18th century. You yourself say it perfectly: you “revelled in the recreation of the 18th century world at sea.” That’s exactly it.

I think O’Brian genuinely did love Austen, but he knew that the 18th century (like any century) had many worlds within it, and he shows us one that co-existed with her world but was in a different part of it, mentally, emotionally, socially, geographically. A world of men. I see O’Brian as deriving very much from the Hornblower novels (which I also devoured as a girl).

Oh yes, even though I’m not much of a moviegoer and never have been (even less now) I have my lifelong favorites that I’ve seen many times, as you do. Lots of them are comfort ones or the old 1930s/40s black and whites we used to see on TV. The Red Shoes. I Know Where I’m Going. Roman Holiday. I, Claudius. Darling. To Each His Own. Gidget. The Lady Vanishes. The Wicker Man. Shoulder to Shoulder. Idiosyncratic…and lots that I can’t think of now!

I’ve never read a Hornblower book — only about them. In a way my love of the Graham books is a later life surprise to me; his belong to the male side of historical fiction. I love to read about the sea, sea voyages, but in travel literature.

Perhaps today movies hit us closer and make more of an impact than books because we are so inundated by media phenomena, too much to choose from so what hits most dramatically, viscerally keeps its place.

I read all the O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin books one summer about twelve years ago, and surprised myself by loving them. I was no wiser about sailing ships and how to manœuvre them at the end of reading all 23 (or however many there are) than I was at the start, even though as usual I tread every word…. What enthralled me was the friendship between the two leads, and their careers, and their marriages — just like you, Ellen, I think. The many many battles were terrifying, but I had very little idea what was going on.

I also enjoyed the film, to my amazement, but I don’t think I will watch it again for choice. It was very well done, but heavy on the blood and gore and light on the politics….

I was initially surprised by my love of the Poldark novels; re-surprised by how they have stood up for a paper and now again re-resurprised by how they’ve stood up to a rereading and teaching in a class with two lawyers in the audience who poured over a central trial scene in Jeremy Poldark. I begin to believe my mantra they are fine books neglected — though I see the flaws for a woman reader more strongly too. The new mini-series author, Debbie Horsfield changes for the films taught me what is unacceptable today.

I’ve only read one of the O’Brian books (the one where Maturin emerges, he is tortured in it). Izzy (my younger daughter, and on this list) has read aloud parts of others to me.

Part of my love for the Poldark books is the way I identify the Ross-Demelza relationship with Jim and my own, though when I was on the message board (which I did do for a while) of the Graham society I chose as my gravatar Elizabeth Chynoweth with what I consider a still of Jill Townsend who played Elizabeth in the 1970s. She is raped and let me say vanishes in body from the stage at the close of book 7, though she stays on as a presence until the close of book 12 when the long results of the rape are finally (semi-)resolved. Plenty of politics in the Graham books, only I’ve had to face that they are not Jacobin after all, more Girondist at best.

On the blog is a dialogue between me and Diana Birchall about the relationship of the books and movie to Austen’s books and life as well as the mystery of what we do fall in love with certain books or movies.

Another set of books I wish I had more time for — one of the uses of listening to books in my car is I get to read more books — or have them read to me.

If you plan to read more O’Brien, you owe it to yourself to begin at the beginning, that being the book Master and Commander. All of the novels are based on true events taken from British Naval records of the time and the writings of participants both officers and seamen. Life on board was much more primitive than the movie indicates and Jack is portrayed as a very ‘modern’ captain who does not believe in corporal punishment and dives overboard to rescue his seamen on occasion. The movie does an excellent job of portraying the crowded conditions, the primitive medical treatment (very few ships had actual doctors as Stephen was), the necessity to make repairs at sea and the long times away from port and resupply. Viewing the movie as a huge male sex symbol is way over the top, but life at sea was a male environment with all that entails. Just like life at an Antarctic research station before women were included as researchers. (My spouse made four trips there and has spent time on US naval vessels before the advent of women seamen).

In reply to Fran, thank you for your reply. There is a book on The Wooden Ships or something like this about sea life in England at the time. I can look it up on my Library Thing for anyone who wants to know the title and author. The book was once and still is much respected, only that it omits homosexuality, denies it was even practiced much, and it is omitted from this film — perhaps from O’Brian’s stories where sex is written in a more adolescent manner — fit for young adults not grown-ups I’d say, especially when it comes to Aubrey. I have you see read enough of the books.

I’ll see what I can get to, but I’m not usually much on boys’ adventure stories even in more sophisticated forms. Joanna Trollope’s The Choir or The Rector’s Wife are more in my usual diet. I think The Far Side of the World is the one that attracts me most for now. Izzy has them all.

On the movie, again I have to disagree and have lots of people in print who see the movie as almost hilariously unself-conscious about its use of maleness — part of its strength is the unself-consciousness. It is after all first a movie. I’m not sure that Weir is so unself-conscious; the hammocks just look too much like male scrotums. This is not the only movie where Bettany can be said to fill in for the missing female role (the sensitive true moral observer).

Be warned, Ellen, if you start this series, it can lead to a mammoth read. I have read the whole series, and one gets very attached to the characters. Maturin and Aubrey are superbly drawn and you get fond of them over the series. There is a carpenter and other ratings that you get to know well too. Even their families ashore get worked into the plots. If you like historical fiction O’Brien’s works are excellent.

The truth is I’ve pulled down the first book and put it on a TBR pile. I do like historical and think the key to the successful ones is the authors have created characters who become beloved. The Poldark novels fall off after the 7th for some because Ross and Demelza are not quite the centers of the books they were.

Fran: “I think you are referring to The Wooden World, an Anatomy of the Georgian Navy by N.A.M. Rodger, a respected naval historian of that period. He cites eleven courts martial for sodomy during the Seven Years War, four of which led to aquittal. He goes on to say that given conditions aboard ship, the length of time spent in port and the overall hatred of sodomy, that sodomy was not only difficult to undertake due to the lack of privacy but that since women were freely allowed on board during time in port it was likely not of interest to the mostly young heterosexual sailors… He also cites the figures for venereal disease which was over 8 percent of ships complement a year. I guess that says something about the sailors focus in and out of port.

Guess I need to look at M&C again. I missed those scrotums the first time around… My guess is that O’Briens ‘adolescent’ approach to sex has more to do with him than his perceived audience. Everyone I know (all adults) read the novels for the insight into the British Navy of Napoleonic times and the excellent re-telling of some famous and not so famous sea battles.

In reply to Fran, yes those are the details I was half-recalling. Nowadays the way the book is seen is analogous to those who would deny that lesbian women before the 19th century also had sex with their partners. It is a refusal to acknowledge, much less accept a intermittent everyday aspect of life at sea; in effect, a refusal to accept the naturalness of homosexuality and dominance-submission patterns in such a world.

I am not interested in sea battles myself; there are a number of good histories that are narrative and tell of the British navy in Napoleonic times. You’d probably get a far more accurate account, but my sense is people don’t read historical fiction to learn history — they do learn some history, at the particular angle of the author’s vision, his ideals (in the case of O’Brian) and how he wants to speak to us through the past. They can be a comment on history, a take, but again that’s probably not what people read them for …. I know people might say that, but people say lots of things.

A fine book of sociological research where the person went to book groups where historical fiction was read — women’s — is Janice A Radway’s Reading the Romance. She did all she could to enter into and read with these common readers and they insisted they read these romances for the history they learned. It makes the reading respectable; funny that this is still an important motive in reading novels. But then it’s an important motive in social life in general.